Matt Rourke/AP Photo Elizabeth Warren speaks at an American Federation of Teachers town hall event at the Plumbers Local 690 Union Hall in Philadelphia, May 13, 2019. There must be a Democratic presidential debate tonight. Surrogates are on the war path and Joe Biden has deployed Ed Rendell, the voluble former Pennsylvania governor, for the attack dog role. But Rendell’s attack on Elizabeth Warren was an avoidable miscalculation, one that will loom large over Biden, the erstwhile (for now) frontrunner and not in a way that moves him closer to his heart’s desire. Rendell’s tantalizing Washington Post op-ed —“I Like Elizabeth Warren. Too Bad She’s a Hypocrite.”—criticized her past acceptance of big-dollar campaign donations. It has brought out the best of Philly’s scribes who have been all too happy to comb through Rendell’s record to point out the numerous instances in which the former Pennsylvania governor and former...

Trump used Hurricane Dorian to launch another series of reflexively puerile insults against Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, and the island’s mainland-enabled corruption. Days earlier, science writers lunged at their keyboards to respond to news of the president’s query about breaking up the storms with nuclear weapons—a discredited idea that occasionally resurfaces during hurricane season. This all before an inch of rain from the storm hit Puerto Rico. One man died preparing for the hurricane; the island escaped severe damage and its infrastructure was not tested. Still, some on Twitter disputed official reports about power outages—the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority claimed that that service was “better than a normal day.” The storm is moving toward Florida and is currently expected to make landfall as a major hurricane. Dorian did lay bare more evidence of Trump’s continuing abuses of power and the inability of...

The baby boomer/millennial test of wills in the House, most notably between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has overshadowed the impatience of Generation X office seekers with the gerontocracy that presides over the Senate. The chamber’s transformation into a hornet’s nest of Trumpian enablers is emboldening younger candidates who no longer want to wait for these solons to move on. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, 77, and his politics of legislative obstructionism will face challenges this year from Democrat Amy McGrath, 44, a retired Marine fighter pilot, and potentially 40-year-old Matt Jones, a beloved sports talk radio host who happens to be quite progressive (he’s considering a run). Maine’s Susan Collins, 66, is feeling the heat on her decision to back Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court from several Democrats, including 47-year-old Sara Gideon, speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. It is easy to cheer for youthful...

In stark paintings and intense, vibrant collages, Whiteside confronts what Donald Trump has wrought and how the long arc of oppression in the American experience oozes into the lives of people of color every day.

P resident Trump has hijacked America’s collective consciousness, fraying the bonds holding a volatile, multicultural nation together. There are as many daily outrages from him as there are hours in the day—and increasingly he utters some of the most nauseous paeans to white supremacy ever delivered by an American president. When the president gets into Esteban Whiteside’s head, powerful and devastating images from the catalog of Trump’s travesties emerge. Whiteside’s works also reach back deep into the African American experience, retrieving shards of slavery, Jim Crow, and police brutality to hurtle them straight at the viewer. There is no middle ground in these challenging tableaux. They force audiences into the tightest chambers of racism where most of the exits are blocked. Such is the power of Whiteside’s subject matter that his work captured the attention of filmmaker Spike Lee, himself a provocateur of the highest order, who featured three...

Representative Elijah Cummings and Baltimore are the latest collateral damage in Donald Trump’s scorched-earth re-election campaign. The president of the United States, ignorant of the rat traps scattered around the White House and the 78 health violations at Mar-a-Lago, over the weekend repeatedly demonized Charm City, birthplace of the Star-Spangled Banner, as a “rat and rodent infested mess.” A man unfit to serve as president of the United States remains at the top of the Grand Old Party’s presidential ticket, as Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mick Mulvaney, and Rick Scott, who position themselves as honorable men , shake hands with the devil in their quest for permanent Republican power. This president’s tenure may just be the greatest travesty ever visited upon this country, a travesty that could go on for years if Americans continue to ignore that the United States is flirting with disaster. Trump’s use of Baltimore’s dysfunction is...